Archive for July, 2008

Aggression in toddlers is normal and healthy. However, some toddlers are so aggressive that they often become angry and bites, hits, kicks, punches, pulls the hair, pinches, etc without any obvious reason.

Toddlers who are very aggressive-likes need special concentration and consideration.

Every parent knows about his or her kids and the times when they become aggressive.

The toddlers try to become independent and they become aggressive because they have immature impulse control.

Some amount of hitting and biting of toddlers is natural, so there is nothing to worry for the parents if their toddlers are aggressive.

Toddlers usually do not know that they are hurting you with hitting and biting and they do not know their strength. Even though this behavior is normal, parents should limit the aggressive behavior in toddlers.

How to prevent aggressive behavior in toddlers?

When your kid is showing aggressive behavior, first you have to stay calm. Take your child out from that aggressive situation and make your kid comfortable for sometime, then you just talk to your kid and explain about the way he/she did and how much it hurts. You should also tell the aggressive kid about what he/she did and that the behavior is not appropriate.

Everyone needs positive peer interaction. It helps maintain self-esteem, builds confidence and broadens one’s perspective. Not to mention that it is enjoyable to have good friends.

Here is how you can encourage positive teen friendships.

1. Get your teen involved with youth groups and activities in the community and at school. Be strong with the rule that your teen must be involved in something, but allow your teenager to choose what groups, sports or activities to join.
2. Talk to your teen about the group or activities. Did he/she meet someone new? Get a feel for the group and the other teens in the group that your teen is talking to. Give this step some time. It may take a month or more to really get to know these new friends. Just continue to enjoy listening to your teenager about their activity.
3. Allow your teen to invite one or two of his/her friends to your home. Pizza and a rented movie is always a big hit. Be prepared to talk to the other parents.
4. Now that your teen has found some new friends, you can encourage positive interation by inviting friends to activities and being available to take and/or pick up when your teen wants to go place with his/her friends.

The onset of puberty can be very thrilling and exciting for parents as well as for young people, but it can be a scary and difficult time to deal with.

Puberty is a natural process of growth that everyone undergoes when they reach their teen years.

Puberty is the stage of life where the youngster goes through a series of bodily changes (physical, hormonal and emotional), from that of a child to that of an adult, to achieve a body capable of reproduction.

The stage usually occurs when the hormones of pituitary gland, the part of the brain, acts on the ovaries or testes to initiate sexual changes in the body.

Children generally enter the puberty stage between the ages of 8 to 16 years, girls within 8 to13 years and boys 9 to 16 years.

As the exact age of puberty onset for a child can vary a little depending on several factors, being a parent, it is a good idea to start talking about puberty to your child as early as possible. But, while talking about puberty to your child

• Always be frank and open
• Discuss by sharing your personal experiences

Handling the kids is one of the biggest tasks for parents. In that, if your kid is stubborn, then it is the most challenging task.

They will definitely do the thing if they decided to do regardless of your threatening them.

For example, a kid locks himself in a room where he needs to take an injection from the doctor.

Some kids show more stubborn behavior than other kids. Of course, every kid will exhibit the stubborn behavior one day or the other.

Here, the spontaneous reaction for every parent is anger.

This stubborn behavior in kids is thought to be a negative feature by the parents.

If you, as a parent, change your thought and take it in a positive way, then you can see that stubbornness is the manner of demonstrating that your kid can think himself and can declare his thoughts and beliefs.

Nonetheless, the stubbornness will vary from unreasonable fears to resistance to alter or just a simple attack of revolution.

Tips to manage stubborn kid

The most important thing is to identify the problem and seek a solution by involving your kid. By doing like this, your kid will not treat you as an enemy.

Rigid, controlling parenting may be linked to increased sexual activity in older teens, U.S. researchers suggest.

However, lead author Rebekah Levine Coley of Boston College said the findings were only “suggestive … not definitive” and did not reveal which parenting techniques work the best.

Coley noted that more than two out of every three U.S. teens has sexual intercourse before age 19.

However, she didn’t provide specific statistics for teens with parents who are more “democratic.”

Coley and her colleagues examined the results of an annual survey of 4,980 American teens born between 1980 and 1984, and used statistical techniques to try to pinpoint the effects of parenting styles.

The findings, reported in the August issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, found that children seemed to be less sexually active if their parents did not engage in negative and psychologically controlling behaviors.

Things such as family dinners, fun activities or religious activities together seemed to make sexual activity less likely, the findings indicated.

“Warm, more democratic relationships — in which parents do not use negative and psychologically controlling behaviors — could help parents to communicate values, increase adolescents’ identification with their parents, help youth to develop healthy decision-making skills and also keep youth away from negative peer influences,” Coley said in a statement.

Is your child having learning disability? Are you exasperated with your kids’ learning disability? Children with learning disability face problems in processing sensory information with which their routine activities at school and work interferes.

Learning disability (LD) is a neurological condition that affects the ability of the brain to perform specific tasks — sending, receiving, processing, communicating, or storing information.

Experts estimate that at least 10 percent of all children have learning disabilities.

LD children possess normal or above average intelligence but often mistakenly labeled as being sharp but lazy.

You can see learning disability in children through the difference between their learning capacity and actual learning ability, as the brain finds difficulty in understanding certain signals and averts from processing the signals’ information [Child learning for good education].

Detecting learning disability in children is more possible when the child begins schooling and finds difficulty in gaining, understanding, organizing, remembering, and expressing fundamental academic skills. Children with LD have following symptoms:

• Difficulty in listening, understanding, or speaking spoken language
• Trouble understanding, remembering and following simple instructions
• Taking long pause before identifying pictures, colors and objects

For teens, summer months bring high-school graduation parties with friends and extended curfews allowing for later nights.

This time of year can also mean that teens have more free time and could face added pressure to drink alcohol.

It’s important for parents to exercise their positive parenting influence and help their teens make responsible decisions.

In fact, when it comes to underage drinking, parents have the biggest influence on their teens’ decisions.

According to the 2007 GfK Roper Youth Report (SM) , 69 percent of teens ages 13 to 17 say their parents — not their peers — are the No. 1 influence on their decisions about whether they drink alcohol [Drunk Teen], and that finding has remained consistent since this survey began more than a decade ago.

Lonnie Carton, Ph.D., director of Teen and Family Resources for the Web-based “Warm2Kids” program and an advisory panel member of the “Family Talk About Drinking” program, offers parents advice on how to use their positive influence with teens as they celebrate graduation and enjoy the more relaxed days ahead.

“It’s important for parents to create an atmosphere of open communication with their teens, especially during the summer months when teens have more free time,” Carton says.

Generally, children flourish in a predictable environment where daily routines such as departures, arrival, mealtimes, feeding, toileting, diapering, and sleeping are dealt by caregivers only.

These daily routines make the children learn about others and about themselves that give them a sense of sensitivity, caring and warmth feeling from the caregivers and teachers.

Because the daily routines help the children to behave appropriately, it is necessary to teach proper daily routines to your children.

Before you start teaching daily routines to your child, it is important to develop a bond of attachment between you and your child. The way you handle daily routines is important for children. With this only, you can create a trust in your child [Developing bond with your child].

For example, for some tasks like diapering and feeding your child, you need to communicate with your child such that they should trust you and should feel comfortable with you. This is called as attachment or a bond of trust.

Tips to develop the bond of trust with your child

• Develop patience and practice listening to your child. You need to pay attention on what your child is talking.

Even among low-income families, mothers with greater social and economic resources were more supportive in parenting their children than those with fewer resources, which in turn influenced the children’s cognitive performance.

That’s the main finding of a new study that considers how economic factors and parenting quality jointly influence children’s development.

The researchers examined 2,089 low-income mothers and their children, who took part in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Study, visiting homes when the children were 14, 24, and 36 months old.

During the visits, researchers measured the quality of parenting (by observing interactions between mothers and their children, and by observing the home environment) and families’ economic resources (specifically, per capita income) to determine how these factors influence children’s cognitive development.

They also looked at the influence of factors such as mothers’ education, children’s birth weight, how often mothers read on their own, and where children’s fathers lived, and sought to learn whether children influence the way their parents interact with them.

Families’ economic resources and the quality of parenting each played a unique role in contributing to children’s cognitive development, the study found.

Emotion in life starts right from a very young age. All kids undergo emotions once in a while.

Moreover, kids are similar to the adults in feeling all types of emotions–happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and many other feelings.

However, children cannot always understand what is happening with them and may not know properly what to do when they feel a particular type of emotion.

As children cannot express their emotions clearly, parents often misread their emotions as sadness or anger [Controlling anger in children].

On the other hand, children occasionally feel emotions very strongly and fluctuate easily from one emotion to the other (happiness to misery) when they get frustrated.

Thus, identifying emotions in children is sometimes very difficult for parents.

Tips to help children manage their emotions

As a parent, help your child understand how to react to a particular emotion when it arises. Also, teach how to manage emotions.

Learning these skills can benefit your child in many ways: emotionally intelligent, able to control emotions effectively, make feel good about themselves, cope with others freely, understand other’s feelings easily, attain less impulsive behaviors, self-confident, focus on things with better attention, and academically very active.